Something the recent hurricane Katrina-related disasters has brought into focus
for us is how ill-prepared we were to deal with even the smallest disruption in
the normal flow of support and services around here. Realizing there is some sort
of middle-ground between full-out survivalism and complete apathy, I have picked
us up some freeze-dried food and similar essentials to make us a bit-more
temporarily self-reliant should the need arise. Hopefully it will never be
necessary... besides, it could also come in handy should we ever decide to scale
Mount Everest.

Yes it is. Enjoy it while in class -- nice code nearly never occurs in the real world (or, rather, it starts off nice and then goes to hell as you patch bugs, fix performance problems, and add features that were never anticipated in the first place and deeply break underlying concepts).

they apparently teach a 3D programming class here

Yeah, my school had an entire Graphics specialization (of course, we also have GVU, which is a fairly sizeable graphics research center). I took the first course which was more than enough for me. It wasn't so much 3D Programming as it was the concepts and underlying algorithms behind 3D. How to determine if a line intersects a plane, how to implement a Z buffer, etc.